Internet Marketing BasicsSearch Engine Marketing
Online marketing articles and websites love to talk about search engine marketing (or “SE” marketing) as if it were the holy grail of online riches. While for some this may be true, for the most part, search engine marketing is only one piece of a larger marketing pie. Search engines are one of the most expensive forms of advertising on the Web, but can be one of the most effective as well. To make the most of search engines, you'll need to hire a professional. Getting a good rank (placement), building an effective strategy, and optimizing your site towards your most effective keywords (words and phrases used to search for your site) requires a lot of time and experience. It can easily turn into a full-time job. When doing search engine marketing, you are really dealing with three separate technologies (though they are often combined): directories, spidered engines, and pay-per-click searches. Directories are search engines that are edited by real humans and are directories of real information on the Web. Yahoo! is a good example of this type of search engine. Most of the results have been reviewed by a real person to be included in the directory. This has advantages and disadvantages for the marketer: the advantage is that you'll tend to get more “targeted” results from those who click through, since they are most likely looking what you have to offer; the disadvantage is that it can take a very long time to get listed in one of these directories and you are not guaranteed to receive a high ranking. Spidered engines are search engines that have computer-based “spiders” which roam the Internet and gather website information. This information is then “indexed” into a master list which gives the results when a user types in a search term. These types of search engine are very popular (Google chiefest among them) and tend to have the latest information in them. Most search engine marketing is geared towards using the technology behind these spiders to better jockey your website for position (rank) in search results. Finally, pay-per-click (PPC) engines are engines which rank sites based upon how much they're willing to pay for each “click-through” they receive from that search engine. For instance, if you are willing to pay 5 cents per click-through from a PPC, you might rank third after someone who's bid 6 cents and another who's bid 8. Most search engines combine at least two of these to give results to the user (searcher). Usually “paid” results (PPCs) are listed in small groups (3-5) according to rank, then targeted results (actual search results) are given. Whether you hire a professional search engine marketer or not, be prepared to spend a good amount of money and a fair amount of time to get yourself ranked well. Most search engine marketers will charge around $3,000 or more to get you highly placed while the average per-click cost at Overture (largest of the PPC engines) is about seventy-five cents.
section 1: Market Research
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